Night Train to Lisbon Read online

  In His omnipresence, the Lord observes us day and night, every hour, every minute, every second, He keeps a ledger of our acts and thoughts, He never lets us alone, never spares us a moment completely to ourselves. What is man without secrets? Without thoughts and wishes that only he, he alone, knows? The torturers, of the Inquisition and of today, they know: cut off his retreat, never turn off the light, never leave him alone, deprive him of sleep and silence: he will talk. That torture steals our soul means it demolishes the solitude with ourselves that we need like air to breathe. Did the Lord our God not consider that He was stealing our soul with His unbridled curiosity and revolting voyeurism, a soul that should be immortal?

  Who could in all seriousness want to be immortal? Who would like to live for all eternity? How boring and stale it must be to know that what happens today, this month, this year, doesn’t matter: endless more days, months, years will come. Endless, literally. If that was how it was, would anything count? We would no longer need to calculate time, nothing could be missed, we wouldn’t have to rush. It would be the same if we did something today or tomorrow, all the same. A million omissions would become nothing before eternity, and it would make no sense to regret something for there would always be time to make up for it. Nor could we live for the day, for this happiness lives on the awareness of passing time; the idler is an adventurer in the face of death, a crusader against the dictate of haste. When there is always and everywhere time for all and everything: How should there still be room for the joy of wasting time?

  A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long. In the immortal soul, a gigantic weariness and a flagrant despair must grow in view of the certainty that it will never end, never. Feelings want to develop and we through them. They are what they are because they retreat from what they used to be and because they flow towards a future where they will diverge. If this stream flowed into infinity, thousands of feelings must emerge in us that we, used to a time, cannot even imagine. So that we really don’t know what is promised us when we hear of the eternal life. How would it be to be us in eternity, devoid of the consolation of being some day released from the need to be us? We don’t know, and it is a blessing that we never will. For one thing we do know: it would be hell, this paradise of immortality.

  It is death that gives the moment its beauty and its horror. Only through death is time a living time. Why does the Lord, the omniscient God, not know that? Why does He threaten us with an endlessness that must mean unbearable desolation?

  I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need the lustre of their windows, their cool stillness, their imperious silence. I need the deluge of the organ and the sacred devotion of praying people. I need the holiness of words, the grandeur of great poetry. All that I need. But just as much I need the freedom and hostility against everything cruel. For the one is nothing without the other. And no one may force me to choose.

  Gregorius read the text three times with increasing amazement. It displayed a rhetorical ability and stylistic elegance equal to Cicero; a force of thought and an honesty of feelings reminiscent of Augustine. Comparable virtuosity on an instrument played by a seventeen-year-old, he thought, would have had people talking of a child prodigy.

  As for the closing sentence, Father Bartolomeu was right: it was moving, the threat. Who did it refer to? He would always choose hostility to the cruel, this boy. If necessary, he would sacrifice cathedrals to it. The godless priest would build his own cathedrals, if only those of golden words, to defy the vulgarity of the world. His hostility to cruelty would become even more bitter.

  Perhaps the threat was not so empty? When he stood at the lectern, had Amadeu unknowingly anticipated what he would do thirty-five years later: refuse to comply with the plans of the Resistance movement, and Jorge’s plans, and save Estefânia Espinhosa?

  Gregorius wished he could hear his voice and feel the molten lava on which his words flowed. He took out Prado’s book and shone the torch on the portrait. An altar boy he had been, a child whose first passion had been for the altar candles and the sacred words that had seemed sacrosanct in their bright glow. But then words from other books had displaced them, words that had run riot in him until he had become someone who placed all strange words on the gold scales and crafted his own.

  Gregorius buttoned his coat, shoved his cold hands in the opposite sleeves and lay down on the bench. He was exhausted. Exhausted from the effort of listening and the fever of understanding. But also exhausted from the inner alertness that this fever generated. For the first time he missed the bed in his Bern flat where, reading, he would wait for the moment when he could finally fall asleep. He thought of the Kirchenfeldbrücke before the Portuguese woman had stood on the bridge and transformed it. He thought of his Latin books on the desk in the classroom. Ten days ago now. Who had introduced the ablativus absolutus in his place? Explained the structure of The Iliad? In the Hebrew class, they had recently discussed Luther’s choice of words when he decided to let God be a jealous God. He had explained to the students the enormous distance between the German and the Hebrew text, a breathtaking distance. Who would now continue this discussion?

  Gregorius was freezing. The last underground train had left long ago. There was no telephone or taxi and it would take hours to walk back to the hotel. Beyond the door of the auditorium, the soft sweeping rustle of the bats was heard. Now and then, a rat squeaked. Beyond that, the silence of the tomb.

  He was thirsty and was glad to find a sweet in his coat pocket. When he shoved it in his mouth, he pictured Natalie Rubin’s hand offering him the brightly coloured sweet. For a split second, it had looked as if she wanted to put it in his mouth herself. Or had he only imagined that?

  She stretched and laughed when he asked her how he was to find Maria João, when nobody seemed to know her last name. They had been standing for days beside a cooked chicken stall at the cemetery of Prazères, he and Natalie, for it had been there that Mélodie had last seen Maria. It became winter and it started snowing. The train for Geneva started to draw out of Bern railway station. Why had he boarded? asked the stern conductor, and in first class to boot. Frantically Gregorius searched all his pockets for the tickets. When he awoke and sat up with stiff limbs, it was growing light outside.

  20

  In the first underground train, he was the only passenger for a while and the train seemed to be just another episode in the silent, imaginary world of the Liceu where he had spent the night. Then Portuguese people started to board the train, working people, who had nothing to do with Amadeu de Prado. Gregorius was grateful for their sober, surly faces akin to the faces of people who got on the bus on the Länggasse early in the morning. Could he live here? Live and work, whatever that might be?

  The hotel porter observed him anxiously. Was he all right? Had something happened to him? Then he handed him a thick envelope with a red wax seal. It had been delivered yesterday afternoon by an old woman who had waited for him until late that night.

  Adriana, thought Gregorius. Of all the people he had met here, only she would seal a letter like that. But the porter’s description didn’t fit her. And she wouldn’t have come herself, not a woman like her. It must have been the housekeeper, the maid whose task would be to remove all the dust from Amadeu’s room in the attic so that nothing indicated the passage of time. Everything was fine, Gregorius assured the porter once again and went upstairs.

  Queria vê-lo! I would like to see you. Adriana Soledade de Almeida Prado. That was all the letter said. Written on expensive stationery, in the same black ink that Amadeu had used, in a hand that looked both awkward and affected. It was as if the writer had laboured over every word. Had she forgotten that he knew no Portuguese and that they had spoken French with each other?

  For a moment, Gregorius was scared by the laconic words that sounded like an order summoning hi
m to the blue house. But then he saw the pale face and black eyes with the bitter look, he saw the woman walking on the rim of the abyss through the room of the brother who could not be allowed to die, and the words no longer sounded imperious, but rather like a cry for help from the hoarse throat with the mysterious black velvet ribbon.

  He examined the black lion, apparently the heraldic symbol of the Prados, embossed on top of the stationery, right in the middle. The lion suited their father’s sternness and the dreariness of his death, it suited Adriana’s black shape, and it also suited the merciless audacity in Amadeu’s nature. But it didn’t suit Mélodie, the light-footed, flighty girl who was the result of unusual carelessness on the bank of the Amazon. Or their mother, Maria Piedade Reis. Why didn’t anybody ever talk about her?

  Gregorius took a shower and slept until noon. He was pleased that he had managed to look after his own needs first and let Adriana wait. Could he have done that in Bern?

  Later, on the way to the blue house, he called at Júlio Simões’s second-hand bookshop and asked him where he could buy a Persian grammar. And what was the best language school if he should decide to learn Portuguese.

  Simões laughed. ‘All at the same time, Portuguese and Persian?’

  Gregorius’s irritation lasted only a moment. The man couldn’t know that, at this point in his life, there was no difference between Portuguese and Persian; that in a certain sense, they were one and the same language. Simões also enquired about his search for Prado and whether Coutinho had been able to help him. An hour later, just before four o’clock, Gregorius rang the bell of the blue house.

  The woman who opened the door might have been in her mid-fifties.

  ‘Sou Clotilde, a criada,’ she said. I’m the maid.

  She ran one hand, marked by a life of housework, through her grey hair and checked whether the bun was in place.

  ‘A Senhora está no salão,’ she said and led the way.

  Like the first time, Gregorius was overwhelmed by the size and elegance of the parlour. His eye fell on the grandfather clock. It still showed six twenty-three. Adriana was sitting at the table in the corner. The acrid smell of medicine or perfume hung in the air again.

  ‘You’re late,’ she said.

  The letter had prepared Gregorius for such stern words. As he sat down at the table, he felt astonished at how well he coped with this old woman’s acerbic style. How easy it was for him to see her whole manner as an expression of pain and loneliness.

  ‘I’m here now,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. And then, after a while, once more: ‘Yes.’

  Without a sound and unnoticed by Gregorius, the maid had come to the table.

  ‘Clotilde,’ said Adriana, ‘liga o aparelho.’ Turn on the machine.

  Only now did Gregorius notice the box. It was an ancient tape recorder, a monster with tape spools as big as plates. Clotilde pulled the tape through the slit in the tape head and fastened it in the empty spool. Then she pushed a button and the spools began to turn. She left the room.

  For a while, only crackling and swooshing were heard. Then a woman’s voice said:

  ‘Porquê não dizem nada?’ Why do you say nothing?

  Gregorius didn’t understand any more, for what now came out of the machine was to his ears a chaotic jumble of voices, covered by swooshing and loud sounds that must have been caused by clumsy handling of the microphone.

  ‘Amadeu,’ said Adriana as a single male voice was heard. Her usual hoarseness had intensified as she uttered the name. She ran her hand over her throat and tightened the black velvet ribbon as if she wanted to press it tighter to her skin.

  Gregorius put his ear to the loudspeaker. The voice was different from what he had imagined. Father Bartolomeu had talked of a soft baritone voice. The pitch was right, but the timbre was harsh, you felt that this man could speak with cutting sharpness. Did it also have something to do with the fact that the only words Gregorius understood were ‘não quero’, I don’t want to?

  ‘Fátima,’ said Adriana, when a new voice emerged from the jumble. The contemptuous way she uttered the name said everything. Fátima had been in the way. Not only in this conversation. In every conversation. She hadn’t been worthy of Amadeu. She had illegitimately laid claim to him. It would have been better if she had never entered his life.

  Fátima had a soft, dark voice and you observed that it wasn’t easy for her to prevail. In the softness, was there also the demand to be listened to with special attention and tolerance? Or was it merely the swooshing that produced this impression? Nobody interrupted her, and ultimately the others let her have her say.

  ‘Everyone is always so considerate of her, so damn considerate,’ said Adriana, as Fátima was still speaking. ‘As if her lisp were a dreadful fate that excused everything, all religious sentimentalism, simply everything.’

  Gregorius hadn’t heard the lisp, it had drowned in the accompanying static.

  The next voice belonged to Mélodie. She talked at a fast pace, seemed to blow deliberately into the microphone and then burst out laughing. Adriana turned away in disgust and looked out of the window. When she heard her own voice, she quickly reached for the switch and turned it off.

  For a few minutes, Adriana looked at the machine that had brought the past into the present. It was the same look as on Sunday, when she had looked down at Amadeu’s books and had spoken to the dead brother. She must have heard the recording hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. She knew every word, every rustle, every crack and swoosh. It was as if now, too, she was sitting with the others, over in the family home where Mélodie now lived. So why should she speak except in the present tense or in a past tense that was as if it were only yesterday?

  ‘We couldn’t believe our eyes when Mamã brought the thing home. She’s impossible with machines, just impossible. Afraid of them. Always thinks she’ll break them. And then she brings home a tape recorder of all things, one of the first ones you could buy.

  ‘“No, no,” Amadeu said when we talked about it later. “It’s not because she wants to immortalize our voices. It’s something quite different. It’s to make us pay attention to her again.”

  ‘He’s right. Now that Papá is dead and we have the office here, her life must seem empty to her. Rita hangs around and seldom visits her. Fátima does go to see her every week, but that doesn’t help Mamã much.

  ‘“She’d prefer to see you,” she says to Amadeu when she comes back.

  ‘Amadeu doesn’t want to visit her any more. He doesn’t say it, but I know. He’s a coward when it comes to Mamã. The only cowardice in him. He who usually faces up to unpleasant things, all of them.’

  Adriana gripped her throat. For a moment, it seemed as if she’d start talking about the secret hidden behind the velvet ribbon, and Gregorius held his breath. But the moment passed and now Adriana’s look returned to the present.

  Could he listen again to what Amadeu says on the tape? asked Gregorius.

  ‘Não me admira nada,’ That doesn’t surprise me. Adriana began to quote and then repeated every one of Amadeu’s words from memory. It was more than a quotation. It was an impersonation which not even a good actor could have bettered. It was perfect. Adriana was Amadeu.

  Gregorius understood não quero and could make out something new: ouvir a minha voz de fora. Hearing my voice from outside.

  As she came to the end, Adriana began to translate. That the whole thing was possible, no, that didn’t surprise him, said Prado. He knew the technical principle from medicine. But I don’t like what it does with words. He didn’t want to hear his voice from outside, he didn’t want to inflict that on himself, he disliked himself enough already. And he hated the permanence of the spoken word: you usually spoke in the liberating awareness that most of it would be forgotten. He found it frightening to have to think that everything would be preserved, every thoughtless word, every tasteless remark. It reminded him of the indiscretion of God.

  ‘He only m
utters that,’ said Adriana. ‘Mamã doesn’t like such things and it confuses Fátima.’

  The machine, it destroyed the freedom of forgetting, Prado said. But I’m not scolding you, Mamã, it’s also a lot of fun. You mustn’t take everything your clever son says so seriously.

  ‘Why the hell do you always try to appease her?’ Adriana flew off the handle. ‘When she tortured you so much in her gentle way! Why can’t you simply stand up for what you think? Like you always do! Always! ’

  Could he listen to the tape once more, for the voice? asked Gregorius. The request touched her. As she rewound the tape, she had the face of a little girl, surprised and happy that the grown-up found it as important as she did.

  Listening to Prado’s words, Gregorius put the book with the portrait on the table and stared at it until the voice seemed to come from the subject’s lips. Then he looked at Adriana and was scared. She must have been looking at him constantly and he saw that her face had opened; all the severity and bitterness was gone and what remained was an expression welcoming him into the world of her love and admiration for Amadeu. ‘Be careful. With Adriana, I mean,’ he heard Mariana Eça say.

  ‘Come,’ said Adriana. ‘I’d like to show you where we work.’

  Her step was firmer and faster than before when she led the way down to the ground floor. She was going to her brother in the office, she was needed, no time to lose; someone who has pain or fear can’t wait, Amadeu used to say. Unerringly, she put the key in the lock, opened the door and turned on all the lights.

  Thirty-one years ago, Prado had treated his last patients here. A fresh paper cloth was spread on the examining table. On the instrument cabinet were the sort of syringes no longer in use today. In the middle of the desk sat an index card file of patients, one of the cards inserted at an angle. Next to it the stethoscope. In the wastepaper basket a wad of bloody cottonwool. Hanging from the door, two white coats. Not a particle of dust.